From Broward EOC: 4,060 without power

As of 5 p.m., 4,060 Florida Power & Light customers were without power in Broward, company spokesman Richard Gibbs said.

That’s a decrease of 500 since 2 p.m., but Gibbs said he couldn’t speculate about whether the number would increase or decrease Sunday night.

Otherwise, things are getting back to normal.

Monday should be “a normal work day for most of us” in Broward County, Chuck Lanza, director of the county Emergency Management Division, said Sunday.

“We’re starting to get to normal right now,” he said.

Almost all county government operations will be operating normally, he said, and he expects the private businesses to do the same. The biggest exceptions are for school children and their parents because schools are closed.

On Monday, he said, fire departments will survey their communities looking for any problems stemming from the storm. Based on what he’d seen by late Sunday afternoon, Lanza said he didn’t expect them to find much.

He said emergency officials practice all the time, but even multiple rehearsals don’t compare to having an actual event. “I think we’ve done very well,” he said. “I think the whole week [preparation for Isaac] has been very, very good.”

Lanza said he’s gratified at “how well people worked to protect the community.”

He said people who worked the emergency over the weekend would gather, probably later this week, to figure out if anything didn’t work and what needs to be improved in future storms.

The emergency manager conceded it’s a tricky combination of art and science to figure out just how much of an alarm should be sounded before a storm – balancing the need to protect public safety with the possibility that people seeing a mild storm might not heed warnings the next time.

“We don’t get the luxury of seeing what this is going to be like three days in advance,” he said. “We’re always looking at what the forecast is. You try to outsmart these things. This is nature. It’s always going to be different than what we planed on.”

Even with what many people see as a relatively light storm, there are perils, Lanza said, advising people to “be very cautious.”

He reminded people to treat any inoperable traffic signals as four-way stops.

And, he said, people should stay out of water, which can hide dangers such as downed power lines. “Puddles are always very dangerous.”

Here are the latest updates:

5:08 p.m. Broward’s 3-1-1 telephone hotline took in 3,920 Isaac-related calls over two days by the time it shut down at 5 p.m. Sunday.

Most of the calls – 2,329 came in the 10 hours the line was open on Sunday. The high point was about 270 calls an hour, officials said.

The line was open for eight hours on Saturday, and took in 1,591 calls.

4:46 p.m. Broward’s emergency managers are going home. After the county weathered Tropical Storm Isaac, most of the crew at the county command post, the Emergency Operations Center are leaving.

Chuck Lanza, director of the emergency management division, said staffers who oversee shelter operations would remain on duty all night because shelters would remain open.

4:36 p.m.: Broward County shelters for people seeking refuge from Tropical Storm Isaac will remain open Sunday night, officials said, though there aren’t many people taking advantage of them.

There were 16 people in the two general shelters as of 3 p.m. Sunday. Plus there were four pets at the pet-friendly shelter. Only 3 people spent Saturday night at the shelters.